jtcohen

Thank you very much !!! Really appreciate this :)

Yes

Safely handling tritium is fantastically more complicated that the fuel of a fission power plant - I disagree with this, especially when considering the infinitely long HLW with fission fuel. Handling Tritium isn't easy but it's much more manageable.

Tritium breeding: we will have a FLiBe blanket and breed tritium, but we won't be processing and pulling out the Tritium on board, that will happen on land, so at port you drain the Tritiated FLiBe and replace it with Li-6 enriched FLiBe. There's a few companies working on the Tritium fuel cycle technology that are making great progress.

Lol - on it

Thank you!

Agreed!

Nope, that's it! We do need vastly larger quantities though, on the order of a kilogram.

Unlike what the nuclear Navy does today which is directly mechanically link the steam turbine to the propeller... we have the turbine spin a generator that creates a high voltage electric bus, which can than power a motor for propulsion. But you can 'easily' swap out the motor and tap off that HV bus for any other electrical load. Agree with all those other potential applications for mobile power at sea, there's a ton! Even disaster relief after hurricanes sort of thing, if the grid goes down we sail over and support.

The customers are interested, there's really no slam dunk other way to decarbonize the industry, it's a super hard (and expensive) problem.

Exactly this !!

Our device is larger than SPARC (~3m major radius) and less power (100MW fusion), hence the confidence in being able to solve the steady-state (repeated inductive pulses) engineering challenges.

We won’t be the first to Q>1, I’m super excited for SPARC to achieve that and will be prepared with champagne.

We’re targeting early 2030’s for our reactor, we’re going straight for the full thing no sub scale reactor in between (we do have a plan for milestone-ing it out in a meaningful way)

I’ve worked on a few alternative approaches earlier in my career (FRC at Princeton, dense plasma focus at LPP Fusion) … I think all fusion approaches are worth looking at, but I’m placing my chips on the tokamak. If I were to pick a runner up, the stellerator.

Thank you! We're probably going to have to eventually use every engineering software in existence haha for CAD, mainly solidworks and CATIA, for EM Physics modeling: COMSOL. But most of the analysis is done with specialized plasma physics and radiation transport codes like MCNP or Open MC.

With fusion, there is no Uranium or Plutonium or highly radioactive materials. The main concern is Tritium which is a categorically reduced concern from enriched Uranium (but still needs to be secured and accounted for).

Saw that this morning as well, it's awesome. I do think long term especially for grid applications stellarators could be great... note that their design is ~2.7GW I believe. We're talking gigantic traditional power plant size, which the world needs, but the first generation of these facilities will cost multi billions of dollars. Also with the stellarator, doing non planar HTS coils and the associated manufacturing challenge is a very very hard problem.

Thank you! Household fission reactors: my take is that from a technical perspective we could definitely do it. It's more from a proliferation and nuclear waste perspective, will it be allowed and accepted by the public? Not sure, maybe though.

We can get pretty far along! From magnetic system design, vacuum vessel, RF heating system, cryogenic system, tritium fueling, etc we can start making a ton of progress today. The main things we still need to learn that can influence the design is advanced divertor scenarios and what are best material choices for plasma facing components (PFC's).

True there would be other land based uses for a 25MWe fusion reactor, the thing is it will be quite expensive and hard to compete on $/kWh against other energy sources... it's easier to compete in maritime / there aren't as good alternatives.